First of all, I love this plugin! However, I was forced to disable it after my hosting service shut my site down. I was using the latest version of Featurific (which I believe is when the problems started) on Wordpress 2.7.1. Apparently, the plugin was causing an overload on the database and CPU. I narrowed it down to Featurific by disabling all other plugins. Once Featurific was enable, the server resources spiked. Unfortunately, I don't have any specific errors to report other than the SQL query that was happening when the server overloaded:

thanks for the reply! To answer your question, I have approx. 2,200 posts on my installation. I've recently tried various settings in Featurific, such as the database vs. file setting and plugging in my own article numbers vs. having it return the most popular. All of them cause my hosting's servers to crash. Once I disable the plugin, server stability is fine. I'm halfway tempted to set up my own test server so I can try to replicate the problem and see what's going on. Any suggestions on what could be causing this would be great... thanks!

(04-30-2009 03:45 AM)rinogo Wrote: Hi Kevin,

Sorry to hear that you're having problems with Featurific. Can you tell me how many posts you have on your Wordpress installation?

We've have noticed some performance issues related to using Featurific on a site with a large number of posts. An SQL 'left join' is known to be a performance bottleneck, but even for 2,200 rows, it shouldn't be causing this much of a problem. However, until we can figure out what the problem is, there seems to be a workaround. Please read the following post, experiment a bit, and let me know if it works for you.

No, actually it didn't and I've had to give up working on this and just not use the plugin. Whenever I simply enable the plugin, it crashes my hosts' server and they shut my site down. So until I can get a test server to play with, I won't be able to use this plugin. thanks though!

Just one last thought - I'm trying to fix this issue, but I need a bit more info. Can you post a link to your website so I can investigate? And just to make sure I understand what you've tried, you did try changing "'numberposts' => FEATURIFIC_MAX_INT," to "'numberposts' => 500," (etc) as described in the other post I linked to, correct? And Featurific still causes the overload? Or, it just doesn't work?